posted by Ironhell on Nov 29, 2013:
retro said:
Druid: And Adam Sandler! Worth a watch.
The problem is that some drives of that era looked the same, but weren't. Now, most of the tapes Kev has should be fine and readable. However, with older tapes, you might encounter problems. I guess you could say akin to putting a PAL VHS in an NTSC machine. You're not going to make much sense of it. Hopefully, that issue would be restricted to just wasting money on the wrong drive, rather than causing damage, mind you.
Perhaps using Kevs list of acclaim employees (if not considered a privacy breach) to find the one responsible for backing the data up could give alot of needed data. Ive got the idea from this very thread that so long as the tape drive is in working condition (of course tested to the nth degree) then the data could be dumped raw? and then toyed with at leisure.
Tracking NOS drives that match the tapes type (dds-1 dds-2 ait ect) and picking the better quality brands could go along way to ensuring compatibility. if they're anything like the VHS, then they'd be quite resilient, even if loaded using wrong read speed ect the tape data would likely be undamaged (i remember my vhs eating a bunch of tapes and cassette even further than that and then re spooling em and they worked fine.) That and the likely extreme redundancy works in our favour.
in the case of wasting money Id rather put it out to get good quality (albiet older) hardware and risk that then trying to save and ending up with real bad stuff. I just need to have an idea what brands or other types not listed im looking for
